19 ms·

Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

240 points by nathan_phoenix 5y ago

washadjeffmad 5y ago
Google Maps is built on uncompensated user submissions, much of it involuntary (data from navigation, live and historical location, etc). We aren't their customers, we're the employees. That's why data ownership is such a verboten topic, it breaks their entire model.
zaik 5y ago
I contribute to OSM because I want to make alternatives to Google Maps like OsmAnd or Organicmaps more useful. That big players also use open data does not invalidate my reasons to contribute.
- jefftk 5y ago
  In fact, that big players also use it supports your reasons: everyone contributing back data helps make OSM more useful.
ydlr 5y ago
> They employ nobody in the OSM community. I imagine many of the employees that do the work mentioned in the article would consider themselves part of the OSM community.
- petee 5y ago
  I suspect they are suggesting a difference between working to contribute as part of the community, versus being solely to further their company's product.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I was hoping they'd include a comment describing what they mean when they talk about employing someone in the OSM community (and how they'd know).
- burkaman 5y ago
  Here's one example of a person employed by Apple to work on OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/andrewwiseman https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/andrewwiseman Facebook and Microsoft are also "Gold Corporate Members" of OSM which costs €10,000 / year, and they are "Corporate Partners" of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which does employ people to directly work on OSM: https://www.hotosm.org/ https://www.hotosm.org/. Also apparently "nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member" (https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/), and lots of people must be employed by corporations to make that happen, even if it's mostly automated edits.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Seems like circular reasoning: Being a part of the OSM community means they aren’t employed by OSM as employees. If they employ the person, they’re no longer a community member but an employee. I don’t actually see the issue.
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    > they aren’t employed by OSM Note that OSM does not employ anyone (Open Street Map Foundation has very limited employees and contractors, see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employees https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employee... )
phh 5y ago
At this point, I don't really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure. It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense economical value for the society. All alone, it's not really useful to end-users, but it can help a lot of businesses that couldn't exist before it. Maps are already considered infrastructure, since they are already made by governments! The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it.
- Proven 5y ago
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it. The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets, and many such datasets are already in use and being used to improve OSM (and often problems are reported back, resulting in fixes in official datasets!). Government official editing directly would be in many cases more harmful than useful.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    > The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets Second best way to contribute is to force commercial corporations to share the datasets they have of what is essentially public data - what is in the physical world and where. Currently, I see a lot of this kind of data on Google Maps, but not on OSM (e.g. location of various cultural and commercial venues, public transportation lines and schedules etc.) And by "force" I mean something like legislation or regulation.
  - phh 5y ago
    I understand why you say this (which sums up to "governments are bureaucrats, please get out of the way for us to do the actual job"), but the issue is that there are still people needed to go from government data to OSM. Ideally, governments would simply pay OSM people to do it on their own, but eh, we know this can never happen, and even if it did, greedy people might be tempted by that kind of money and would go into the OSM community just for that.
an_alien_heat 5y ago
No, because you shouldn't do work for giant tech companies for free.
throwaway984393 5y ago
If all open source software had new license terms tomorrow that said "no commercial use unless you pay me a license fee", they'd just stop using open source. Using it is a business calculation. If you don't get support and you have to pay for it, you might as well pay for proprietary software that you can get support from. And maybe that's fine! Maybe we shouldn't let companies use the software at all. But that would have ecosystem-shaking results as the costs are passed down to consumers and fewer engineers are employed. At this point, the whole world is dependent on OSS. Open Source does not exist for people to get paid. If it did, it'd be the worst software gig in the world, by pay anyway :) To ask for money just because somebody else is getting money and you're not is simply envy and greed. Either ask for the money up front before you release the thing, or don't worry about what other people are getting paid.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  The (strict) philosophy of open source isn't to take money from its adopters, or to prevent them to monetise, it is to spread the openness to serve humanity by having the intelligence reused and built upon rather than energy wasted on replicating and competing. Competition is a waste, contrary to the misinformation we have been subjected to, it only serves a minority at the expense of everyone else. Collaboration offers far greater efficiencies, the essence and success of open source lies in the openness and contagion of openness to share the yield of commutative expenses. I think the valid discontent you express is with regards to the open source flag being used to promote goodwill while in reality building a business model on it with closeness to protect monetisation. that I agree has been a plague and a very disingenuous approach to doing business, at the end hurting opensource, at least tarnishing the goodness reputation open source has built for decades.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    > Competition is a waste I partially agree with this claim, but - FOSS software does not prevent competition, it just takes the intellectual property and copyrights aspect from it. You compete in conditions of access to your competitor's data as well as yours. And there is intense competition in FOSS! It doesn't devolve into everybody working on the same thing. But the point is it is always possible to derive from one of the "branches" of competition and do your own thing. (Case in point: Desktop environments which based themselves on GNOME 2 because they didn't like where GNOME 3 was headed design-wise.)
mwattsun 5y ago
I've enjoyed Google Maps for many years and never paid for it. Apple MapKit appears to be free. I improve the experience for others when I help improve the maps and in turn my experience is improved by the contributions of others. It's costs Google and Apple money to provide the infrastructure for this, which they obtain in various ways such as advertising. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to advertise their store on a map I helped create. In fact, even that improves the amount of information I have about a place. My answer to the title question is a strong "yes" in this case and I consider it akin to a grocery store putting up signs saying "Please help us keep costs down and pass the savings along to you by returning your cart to the cart stand." Giant mega corp Walmart does this if memory serves. I like that humanity has built such an amazing thing as maps and like it when people return their shopping carts.
- TheJoeMan 5y ago
  Question: if I contribute a fix to Google Maps or Apple Maps, does that fix back-propogate to OSM? My home address needs to be slightly shifted and wondering for best practice.
  - thepete2 5y ago
    No and that is IMO the point of using OSM in the first place. The data is public and free for everyone and if you contribute there's the possibility of other services adopting your change. I know that mapbox integrates osm data, Google and Apple might too.
  - windthrown 5y ago
    No, in fact copying from Google Maps is a violation of their terms of service: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_don.27t_you_just_use_Google_Maps.2Fwhoever_for_your_data.3F https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_don.27t_you_just...
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    If you contribute to Google Maps then you fix private Google database.
cheeaun 5y ago
I’m curious to know if the companies that use OSM actually contribute back? Like fixing all the wrong/malicious data.
- burkaman 5y ago
  Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ > nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member.
  - tapiok 5y ago
    ...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.
    - burkaman 5y ago
      Can you expand on how contributions suck economic value from the community? What community, and what value is being lost?
      - tapiok 5y ago
        The economic value left on the table by volunteers is consumed not by the ones who need it most, but by people who need it the least. This breaks the 2nd principle of justice as formulated by Rawls. Shall I say more...
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      As a user of OSM (and having contributed in the past but that's not relevant to my point) it looks like, to me, that if their share of edits is growing that they are providing free labor to me and people like me, no?
    - ciphol 5y ago
      Corporations, whether giant or not, create products which people chose to purchase because they are useful. That's creating value, not sucking value. Sometimes a corporation can "suck value" by using anticompetitive behavior to prevent competitors from offering better/cheaper products to consumers. But in this case, Google is the big corporation, and contributions to OSM benefit smaller competitors at the expense of Google, creating more options and more value for consumers overall.
Rygian 5y ago
The main difference is that, with OSM, a third party can make direct commercial profit from my edits, but so can anyone else including me.
- thepete2 5y ago
  Your edit to google maps is a competitive advantage. Your edit to OSM is a public utility.
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    Google's competitive advantage?
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      Yes, exactly. If someone improves Google Maps then such contribution is under control and owned by Google. If someone improves OSM then such contribution can be used by anyone - from hobby map maker, through artists, maker of open source navigation to evil corporations.
hirako2000 5y ago
no. I wish osm would adjust their licensing to prevent reuse of contributions to build non free (as in open) servicing.
- simonh 5y ago
  Since companies including Apple and Microsoft contribute a lot of data and funding to OSM, what benefits do you imagine would result from preventing them using it?
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  It's the permissive vs. free software license debate. In practice there are people who won't be able to use the data for their use case if a non-permissive license is applied.
  - nightpool 5y ago
    > In practice there are people who won't be able to use the data for their use case if a non-permissive license is applied Well, of course. The whole point of a non-permissive license is to.... not permit things. It's frustrating to see people bring this out like some sort of gotcha. I use the AGPL because I think it's important that users have access to the source code the applications they interact with operate on. If people aren't okay with that, then they're completely welcome to not use my code. (I am somewhat sympathetic to people who think that the GPL's definition of "Combined Work" is too broad—I've personally never viewed the inclusion of dependencies in a dynamic programming language with strong module boundaries like Node, Ruby or Python as creating a "Combined Work"—and I'd happily license my works with a theoretical LAGPL or an Affero-like Mozilla Public License if either of those were available. Unfortunately, the AGPL remains the only game in town for networked software.)
    - pcthrowaway 5y ago
      I'm not sure if you're aware, but the data on OSM is covered by their ODbL which is a "share-alike" license. From their FAQ[1]: What do you mean by Share-Alike? If you publicly use any adapted version of our database, or a partial extraction from it, or works (such as maps) produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL. In other words, if you improve our data and then distribute it, you need to share your improvements with the general public at no charge. A painless way to do that is to contribute your improvements directly back to OpenStreetMap. Share-Alike only applies if you distribute what you have done to outside people or organisations. You can do what you like at home, or in your school, organisation or company ... the following section does not apply to you. It's true that people can use their software and data for non-free services built on non-FOSS code, but people using the data publicly do have to distribute modifications to the data-set under the same license [1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License
yosito 5y ago
This article is a bit scattered. But it makes one good point: Big Tech companies are profiting off of the OSM data set, while employing no one working on OSM. How do we change that?
- simonh 5y ago
  Apple and Microsoft do contribute a lot of data back to OSM though, as pointed out in the article, and they help fund it. OSM doesn’t employ anyone full time, but there are Apple and MS employees that contribute to OSM near or actually full time. So what exactly is it you think needs changing?
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    Strictly speaking OSM does not employ anyone partly because it is not some legal entity. (Open Street Map Foundation has very limited employees and contractors, see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employees https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employee... )
- burkaman 5y ago
  We don't need to change that because it isn't true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714360 The author is using very specific phrasing ("in the OSM community") that apparently excludes corporate employees that contribute to OSM.
  - tapiok 5y ago
    of course it is true OSM mappers provide free labor (also) to corporate giants. They have vested (economic) interest to not fork the OSM project exactly for this reason. Maybe they will do it one day though.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  These companies contribute ~17% of worldwide road change updates, if that's not employing anyone to work on OSM then what exactly do you mean by "work on OSM?"
IgorPartola 5y ago
About 10 years ago I helped build a piece of software that would use OSM data and that data needed to be precise. Turned out that a lot of the Tiger Maps scans were not super accurate so I urged our company to hire a data entry team to clean up a bunch of it. We had I think 5 or 6 people whose job it was to precisely clean up OSM data based on satellite imagery in a bunch of small-medium cities as well as Chicago. Everyone benefitted from this which was awesome.
- tomrod 5y ago
  In today's AI/ML saturated landscape, your approach to data labeling to augment applications is much needed. Awesome to hear it went well!
- tverbeure 5y ago
  The TIGER data was (is?) terrible in terms of exact coordinates, but the graph of the streets is usually accurate. Back in 2007 or so, I spent hundreds of hours aligning TIGER data to the satellite imagery in OSM, usually in cities I never had been before. If I remember correctly, I did most of Fresno. :-) I’m totally fine with my edits being used commercially too.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    The status of the initial Tiger data varies by county. Many counties were poorly aligned, but many counties were also pretty good, depending on whether the county had been updated in a quality improvement project that Census was doing when the OSM import happened.
matkoniecz 5y ago
> Microsoft Bing uses OSM in several regions, and is slowly moving from it’s traditional providers to OSM globally. They provide machine-learning (ML) datasets that they have computed from areal imagery. They employ nobody in the OSM community. Microsoft Bing made its aerial imagery available for OSM editing, this is often very very very useful for mapping (speaking from own experience as an OSM mapper). See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/product/imagery-service-editor-app-apis-terms https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/product/imagery-service... > The rights that you have under this agreement are limited solely to aerial imagery use in a non-commercial online editor application of OpenStreetMap maps (an "Application") see also extra info in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clarifications https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clari... It is an interesting case as cost of that is basically nothing to Microsoft, this action has a very clear benefits to them, has negative influence on their competition like Google, has basically no negative side effects to OSM community (unlike company hiring people) and provides service that would cost OSM community ridiculous amounts of money if we would need to buy it (it would be impossible for us to buy worldwide aerial imagery of such quality). It is weird to not mention it in that article.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  > costs basically nothing to Microsoft I wouldn't be surprised if this agreement was a big headache when Microsoft is licensing imagery from various satellite imagery providers.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    Well we have SpaceX now... and Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. Launch some satellites.
    - delusional 5y ago
      The highest quality aerial photography of my country (Denmark) is taken from planes, not satellites.
123pie123 5y ago
I wish Ordnance Survey in the UK would help out a little with the UK dataset - even with just say the buildings
- g_p 5y ago
  OS is increasingly making available data under public open licences. I believe data under open government licence should be compatible with OSM, as it's pretty permissive. If you combine a few different datasets you can build a pretty good picture https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products?Product%20type=0/154/173/175 https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/product... The UPRN dataset gives you a point coordinate for each property. The Zoomstack map gives building level vectors, I believe (if it isn't Zoomstack, it's one of the other free and open ones), and is pretty usable in qgis and other tools.
  - 123pie123 5y ago
    thanks, would that make it ok for someone to import the information from OS to OSM? edit: found the answer (abeit an old thread) https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=66173 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=66173
matkoniecz 5y ago
> The only one I can recommend as being easy to use is StreetComplete for Android This is nice to hear as major contributor to that software (if you use that app and something is unclear then it is likely a bug that should be reported to https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues )
VictorPath 5y ago
OpenStreetMap has an "on the ground rule" where a street, a street name, a city, a city name etc. are determined by who currently has control on the ground. So the Malvinas are the Falkland Islands, Derry is Londonderry etc. The sole exception to this is the Crimea, which the OSM board ruled is exempt from this rule, as they favor the Ukrainian government over the Russian government.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, looking at your comment history: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
- avar 5y ago
  Your summary seems inaccurate per https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DWG_2014-06-05_Special_Crimea https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DW... I.e. they ruled that any mass changes based on administrative declarations weren't OK, but changing street names was fine if the on the ground signage had been changed.
  - VictorPath 5y ago
    Well, the secretary of the OpenStreetMap foundation also said they are making an exemption to their rules in the case of Crimea ( https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-February/005972.html https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-Feb... ). So either what I and the person in charge of it are saying is inaccurate, or what you are saying is inaccurate.
    - avar 5y ago
      You started that they were making an exception to "[on the ground rules] where a street, a street name, a city, a city name etc. are determined by who currently has control on the ground". This falls under criteria #3 on the linked page[1] and as far as I can tell is being done with the same "on the ground" rule that OSM has always used. The exception you're linking to is relevant to what country relation and similar data structures Crimea is in. The usual application of the rule would be to have it Russia only, but it's in both Russia and Ukraine. Almost nobody who uses OSM ever has to deal with country relations, so implying that this is some major policy change is blowing things out of proportion. It also seems like the least bad way to mark up the data to me. To the extent that geopolitical borders mean anything it's in fact the case that Crimea is still to some extent Ukranian, even though Russia has "on the ground" control. I.e. various other countries have sanctions etc. in place that recognize that that's the case, as opposed to the rest of Russia. If WWII happened today wouldn't the most useful thing for OSM to do to still have say the Channel islands in the UK to some extent in 1943, and under Axis control? I.e. to have overlapping claims of sovereignty, and simply add disputed/occupied relations on top of those? 1. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DWG_2014-06-05_Special_Crimea https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DW...
efsavage 5y ago
> They employ nobody in the OSM community. If they are contributing data, they are part of the OSM community.
nurgasemetey 5y ago
While working with municipalities, they provided us with shapefile of bicycle routes and add to our systems. It would have been better if they just added bicycle routes to OSM but I think they don't want to take responsibility of maintaining it.
sovietmudkipz 5y ago
I struggle with contributing to open source but in a different context. In my opinion, the video games industry is information sparse on high quality software engineering practices, for whatever reason (NDAs, language/culture, etc). I am already authoring content that basically imports DevOps practices and experiences I have from my day job into a video games context. I believe practitioners have an edge over non-practitioners. Yet I hesitate to release it. I hesitate because ultimately I cannot fully silence my ego. I want to release my content and have a positive impact on game creators. I know my ideas and hard work will be taken and rebroadcast by other teacher content creators without credit. In abstract that my ideas will spread to a wider audience will maximize its impact. ...But I want my hard work to be recognized and credited which is hamstringing my willingness to release. My ego wants me to keep this information private and work in a closed source way. "Ha, I am so smart that I grok this stuff and can apply it," I imagine my mindset saying. "Look at how these fools struggle, ignorant of a better way." However; I have benefited from others making the brave choice to work in an open source way. How do people who give away their work (MIT or CC license) think about it? I feel like a jerk for benefiting from a culture of open source and yet I have this inner conflict?
- davidjytang 5y ago
  I'm not a open source contributor in a major way. Just wanted to chime in. No doubt at least part of your know-how, however small, was built upon others' experiences (also hard to give credit for everything). If you do release your content, this is just giving back to the community. Also to play with your ego side, let's say some other person beats you to releasing the content that you wanted to release. And that person markets well and takes a lot of credit that you wanted. Would your ego push you to publish sooner?
  - sovietmudkipz 5y ago
    Haha, I love the concept of leaning into my ego to try to bring out the same desired outcome. It reminds me how RadioLab did a podcast on the idea of altruism as a selfish trait. I think in a way we are all pilots of this big elephant like meat machine. It has its wants, it has its needs, and as pilots we are trying to steer ourselves with the understanding that the elephant is ultimately doing what it wants. I suppose the trick is to understand the elephant (ourselves) to know how to steer into the direction we want.
juliansimioni 5y ago
Here is why you should contribute to OSM even though there are major players profiting from it: OSM is big enough and good enough that all the tech giants (except Google) would do better to start with OSM and improve it to meet their needs than to start a new, completely proprietary map from scratch. That means that we are in an amazing place where in addition to the substantial volunteer OSM community, there are contributions from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and hundreds or thousands of smaller companies all coming back in to a single global map that everyone can use. It's very worth it to do work that strengthens OSM, as it increases the number of companies that will use it, and possibly contribute back, rather than doing work the world at large won't benefit from. P.S. As a disclaimer, I am co-founder of Geocode Earth (https://geocode.earth https://geocode.earth) a small business that does indeed profit from OSM (and other open) data. We also contribute back both through OSM contributions and by releasing our core software as the Pelias geocoder (https://pelias.io https://pelias.io)
- humanistbot 5y ago
  Right! Remember when Google made their Maps API far more restrictive and it broke a whole bunch of cool applications that were built on top of it? That can't happen with OSM.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Yes, would it be really better to be in situation where standard dataset is proprietary and controlled by Google?
- lukeqsee 5y ago
  I second Julian here, as the founder of another company (in profile) that profits heavily from OSM's data set. It's amazing how good OSM is today, and the rate at which it's expanding and improving means it will only get much better over time.
  - durkie 5y ago
    Thanks for Stadia maps! Happy paying customer here and it substantially lowered my map hosting bill compared to mapbox.
EGreg 5y ago
Could this be a good use case for cryptocurrency?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  For which part? Main complaint in article is that major companies should employ people from OSM community. But inability to transfer money is not something blocking Microsoft or FB here.
  - EGreg 5y ago
    The part where people contribute anonymously and receive compensation
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  No.
  - EGreg 5y ago
    How are you so sure? Please elaborate
    - lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
      OSM is making a volunteer-run open source GIS dataset, not an unregulated speculative securities offering.
      - EGreg 5y ago
        who is talking about securities? I'm talking about micropayments
- justapassenger 5y ago
  Solution still looking for problems to solve?
cletus 5y ago
It's a good question to ask. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember the cautionary tale of CDDB/Gracenote [1]. Back when Compact Discs were still a thing. on Winamp, WMP, etc you wanted to display a list of tracks, covert art, the artist, etc. Volunteers contributed this data from their own discs (that could be identified). This was before MP3s and ID3 tagging. So volunteers built the CDDB with this data. The entity that "owned" it silently put in a copyright assignment with any submissions and ultimately became a company called Gracenote, which still exists today. They also removed the free access to CDDB. None of this matters today but at the time it was a huge loss and a betrayal. So I personally think it's completely fine to contribute to something like OSM as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access to that data can't be lost. It doesn't bother me if the likes of Apple and Microsoft use that for commercial uses, particularly if in doing so they contribute data back to the project. This is why Stackoverflow dumps [2] were done in the first place and why they're so important: as a guarantee against that data being taken away or put behind a paywall. Beware the CDDBs of the world however. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB [2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-exchange-data-dumps/224922#224922 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-ex...
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access to that data can't be lost. 1) current dataset can be fully downloaded and is available under a copyleft license https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm 2) it would be relatively hard to hijack project https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Terms https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Term... OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL 1.0 for the database and DbCL 1.0 for the individual contents of the database; CC-BY-SA 2.0; or such other free and open licence (for example, http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/ http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/) as may from time to time be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors.
- danShumway 5y ago
gumby 5y ago
> They employ nobody in the OSM community. Malone keeps saying this but I don’t think it means what he says it is. Those large entities employ lots of people who add to OSM. Not only do they add content but by his own description they do QC and add other new features and support. Their contributions are no different (except in magnitude) than a single, tiny contribution I might make, yet presumably that would make me “part of the community” but not them?
- gnufx 5y ago
  Actually, one difference is that contributions by, for instance Amazon in my experience, have been lower-quality than the typical amateur on-the-ground mapping. However, their contributors have been gracious and apparently willing to learn when you point out you've surveyed the area and they've put a service road -- it's usually service roads! -- through a wall next to the house numbers you added, for example. But, yes, it seems rather like saying that Intel or IBM contributors aren't in the GNU community, and that would have been absurd to argue about Cygnus. The worry might be organizational take-over by commercial interests (Linux Foundation?), but that's different.
nraynaud 5y ago
I have tried providing a correction to OSM, they never got moderated or integrated. But there is a local club because they used the email address I provided to invite me. I don’t think I want to spend time doing it again.
- purple_turtle 5y ago
  Edits on OpenStreetMap are not moderated, any edit goes live immediately. Do you remember your account name?
heikkilevanto 5y ago
I have contributed a few details to OSM, as well as to Google Maps. Not for any high-flying moral reasons, but because I use them and found the small errors irritating.
CodeWriter23 5y ago
Yes we should definitely kill off the only mapping solution accessible to bootstrapping startups because big players are semi-freeloading.
- tapiok 5y ago
  there are other options. For example https://n8n.io/blog/fair-code-for-sustainable-open-source-alternatives/ https://n8n.io/blog/fair-code-for-sustainable-open-source-al...
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I use OSM data for free too, and don't employ anyone from OSM. Why wouldn't I fix the data around where I live, if I can, and if it helps me, and everyone else trying to navigate here? I fix stuff here, someone else fixes stuff somewhere else, there are also gamified apps (atleast one), where you can get "badges" to input basic data to OSM, and everyone profits.
maceurt 5y ago
I am against any large scale collection of data that can be used to take away an individual's privacy or to assist a government/business/person's ability to track someone's location or residence. Its one thing to not be able to do anything about a private business collecting this information on their own volition, but its another to actually aid in its collection yourself. The more you accept and buy into this reality the faster it will accelerate out of control with opposition being not just those who stand to gain from its existence, but from useful idiots who don't understand sunk cost fallacy. The biggest hindrance in the long term happiness of the human species is the inability to reverse change. Even while we can admit a certain change is bad, we can never mitigate further change let alone put the cat back in the bag.
- throw8932894 5y ago
  Privacy ship has sailed long time ago. Try to remove license plates from your car. Or refuse to share information about your health! Now it is about gate keeping. Young people and startups, need the same ability as govs and established players. Until recently you could not even embed maps on your website (too expensive). Free data are levelling the playing field. And if anything OpenStreetMap helps me not to share my location. I can store map of entire continent offline on my phone, and do not have to ask remote servers for navigation!
  - maceurt 5y ago
    If we created a change we can un-create it. People who just accept that we are powerless to our past are the architects of our future hell. > I can store map of entire continent offline on my phone, and do not have to ask remote servers for navigation! The fact that you think anybody would need to have that is ridiculous. And also I can store an entire map of pretty much any place I need to go to and it doesn't require a phone.... Furthermore, maps are only necessary in over bloated cities not designed with facilitating humans as the main objective. Just because that is where most people live nonetheless does not make it any more right.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for election to the OSM Foundation board this month.) But, as others have pointed out, I’d hope we’re more welcoming than that. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re editing OSM you’re part of the community.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a member of the community. More generally, there is nothing the big companies could do to make them happy, short of divesting completely from OSM so that they can get their hobby project from 2008 back.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    I’m sure you can find any given opinion in a community of 2m registered users with a public mailing list, especially any community which includes a bunch of 17-year old Linux enthusiasts, but it’s not remotely representative of the OSM community nor a particularly useful subset to identify.
    - kevinventullo 5y ago
      I agree they are not representative of the community, but they are a quite vocal minority, to whom anyone working on OSM in a corporate context is well-acquainted. I offer my observations as a warning to take any anti-corporate sentiment from self-proclaimed OSM community representatives with a grain of salt.
      - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
        I’d fully agree with the latter. Sometimes (often) a gobshite on a mailing list is just a gobshite on a mailing list. (He says, looking anxiously at his own 2000 list postings over 17 years.) The lists are sometimes attributed a significance they don’t really have any more - they have a few hundred subscribers max in a massive project. Most of the OSM US community discussion happens on Slack, in Germany it’s a webforum, some countries use Telegram and so on.
warkdarrior 5y ago
The post claims both that some companies contribute to OSM and that they do not employ anyone from the OSM community. There is some level of gatekeeping here, as the blog implies is that that employees at those companies are not part of the OSM community although they contribute to OSM. With this attitude ("no true OSM contributor unless I approve of"), it is hard to grow the community by welcoming new people.
up6w6 5y ago
Can someone give details about what is the best way to contribute? Is there some easy way like just installing an app in my phone and receive popup notifications to answer some quick questions when I'm in a queue of a random local shop?
- Rygian 5y ago
  Yup, you can install Streetcomplete which does exactly that.
- cowsandmilk 5y ago
  If you’re on Android: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete
- mngnt 5y ago
  Check out StreetComplete. It's basically a map with question icons that help improve osm. It's even a bit gamified, you get achievements for a volume of replies :) Importantly, you can configure which types of question do you get, so you won't get bored by replying the same stuff again. More specialized, but perhaps more important for certain people is wheelmap.org. It catalogues amenities and their wheelchair accessibility. It has similar model for contribution as StreetComplete, you answer question about stairs, door widths and toilet accessibility. Have fun mapping :) Edit: corrected autocorrect.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  If you have iPhone then GoMap!! is a really good editor. On computer you can also open https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/ and navigate to are you know well and press edit (tutorial should appear). There is also Vespucci on Android and JOSM for PC for more powerful and more complicated editing. All editing requires registration for user account. Feel free to use one of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels if you want help from a community (and "I am confused newbie" is a good reason to ask).
epaulson 5y ago
I've always thought OSM's data license should be more BSD-ish than the current LGPLish license. If you were trying to privately build and edit data from OSM, there'd be a pretty strong incentive to get most of your updates and corrections upstreamed back into OSM, (especially for things that are broadly of interest to the rest of the community) because eventually someone will also create those updates in the upstream OSM, and then you'll have to deal with how to merge your changes with the OSM changes. I think OSM would benefit more with more people building on the dataset, because even if a smaller percentage actually contributed back, they'd make up for it with a larger overall set of people building on the dataset. And I think they'd get a larger set of people building on the dataset with a more permissive license. (The obvious counterpoint is OSM is doing just fine with its current license)
- tomarr 5y ago
  I don't think that's obvious, e.g. an Apple or Facebook could take OSM and fork it privately and invest all their efforts into that, without releasing upstream for competitive advantage.
- purple_turtle 5y ago
  Given how BSD was used to create proprietary MacOS and PlayStation operating systems with basically nothing contributed back - I am not convinced.
chaz6 5y ago
I am happy to contribute for free, but after what happened with Mapillary, I would like a clause that states that should OSM be sold, I would be entitled to a portion of the sale amount commensurate with my contributions, or the option to withhold my contributions from the sale.
- commoner 5y ago
  The difference between Mapillary and OSM is that Mapillary is a for-profit company, while OSM is an open dataset managed by a non-profit organization. The OSM Foundation can't sell its intellectual property rights to a for-profit company like Facebook without violating its mission statement:[1] > The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international, not-for-profit, democratic organisation with the tasks of supporting the OSM project, running and protecting the OSM database, and making it available to all. The OSMF membership is open to all who want to support the project and participate in the OSMF’s democratic process. > The OpenStreetMap Foundation is there to protect the OSM data to keep it Free and Open. Mapillary had always stated in their terms that any street imagery contributed to them belong to them. They then relicensed the imagery to be used for OSM contributions and other non-commercial purposes free of charge, but charged for commercial use. When Facebook acquired Mapillary, they obtained ownership of all of the contributions for their own use, but also relicensed them to be available free of charge for both commercial and non-commercial use.[2] Many Mapillary contributors like you did not want Facebook to obtain the data. Since the OSM Foundation is non-profit, a similar situation would not happen to OSM as long as the OSM Foundation continues to be governed by people who have the best interests of the project and the community at heart. [1] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement [2] https://joemorrison.medium.com/why-on-earth-did-facebook-just-acquire-mapillary-9838405272f8 https://joemorrison.medium.com/why-on-earth-did-facebook-jus...
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Terms https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Term... > OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL 1.0 for the database and DbCL 1.0 for the individual contents of the database; CC-BY-SA 2.0; or such other free and open licence (for example, http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/ http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/) as may from time to time be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors. So it would be necessary to hijack Open Street Map Foundation, though it is still possibility. Note that Mapillary from start was for-profit company with contributors giving full right to their photos.
globular-toast 5y ago
> I’m not gonna lie, I kind of like that idea. In the OSM world you just have to have faith that your edits are helping people. There is basically no feedback loop. Do people really need this? I use OSM whenever I go on a walk anywhere in the world and I often think about the local mappers who maintain the data. I can say with almost complete certainty that someone, somewhere has appreciated my own OSM contributions at some point. That's enough for me.
kranke155 5y ago
Seems like a great use case for web3 and DAOs later on when they become a bit less anarchic. You could tokenise contributions to OpenStreetMap.
- timeon 5y ago
  If someone does not want to contribute for free it is his decision. But many people like volunteering. OSM has already massive contribution from hobby users (and from corporations as well). What will "web3" solve here? Not everything needs to be monetized.
npteljes 5y ago
Yes you absolutely should. But, should you expect to make a living out of it? No.
nradov 5y ago
My friends and I use a lot of Garmin fitness trackers and bike computers for endurance sports training. Those devices use maps derived from OSM. So when I contribute data to OSM for free I (eventually) see a direct benefit with better navigation on my devices.
delusional 5y ago
Corollary: Why are contributions to OpenStreetMap systematically undervalued? I think it's a much more interesting question WHY we are being asked to contribute to OSM for free. Why isn't it possible/feasible to gain compensation relative to the amount of value contributed? And what does that mean for our "free market" in general. If you can't compensate this kind of project, are they being repressed by the inherent incentive structures? I don't think that's a failure of the OSM project, but rather a failure of our economic system.
rStar 5y ago
betwixthewires 5y ago
> It may be mainly made by individuals in there spare time, but the big tech companies are making millions of it. Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing credibility. > They are reasonably good at fixing and contributing data to OSM in those regions. They employ nobody in the OSM community. Except whoever contributes data to OSM in those regions? The same for every example in the list. Amazon is literally mapping towns for all of us and giving it away for free. What's the criteria for "in the OSM community" if not "contributes to OSM"? What's the point of FOSS if not this?
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing credibility. Your first sentence has punctuation errors, and your second sentence it littered with grammatical errors...
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    Deliberate, nuance. To get my point across articulated with my sentiment and attitude about what I'm saying. A similar approach to the cultural context included in colloquial dialects. A far cry away from "there" instead of "their" and "of" instead of "off."
jmnicolas 5y ago
To me this article reads like "I want to get a job paid by the big players". The fact is, it's not a one way street, they're contributing back with data. We all benefit from this. While I dislike what these companies stand for (I use a Linux desktop and a degoogled phone) in this case I don't think they're in the wrong.
- cjmalone 5y ago
  > To me this article reads like "I want to get a job paid by the big players". You're not wrong. This is an interesting time in my life. I have next to no formal education and and no work experience worth documenting. In order to pay rent, I've been working retail, through a pandemic, and just before Christmas I finally got Covid. I say "finally" because we all knew it was going to happen. It was never "if", but "when". I'm questioning the amount of value I put into our world, and the amount I get out. Some would argue the amount of value I add to the supermarket is almost nothing, and so I deserve to be paid almost nothing. I'm not going to argue against this, but the supermarket is making record profits and clearly generating lots of "value" for the owners, all while I get a real terms wage cut due to inflation. OSM is the interesting part. I clearly add value to OSM, and in turn everyone who uses it. And it's something I enjoy, and am good at. I would like to be compensated in some way for that. I would love to never have to play Russian Roulette again, simply by being a wage slave in a supermarket in a pandemic. Ironically one of the quantifiable ways I add value to the OSM consumers is by adding address data that gets used by delivery companies. This improves there turn around time for each delivery point, but ultimately leads to a harsher targets for the employees. (Please everyone, watch "Sorry We Missed You"!). > The fact is, it's not a one way street, they're contributing back with data. We all benefit from this. They absolutely do, and I'm grateful for it, but I'm also selfish and want to be compensated. > While I dislike what these companies stand for (I use a Linux desktop and a degoogled phone) in this case I don't think they're in the wrong. They aren't wrong, in terms of the licence. (They are wrong in terms of what they stand for) :P I'm on LineageOS at the moment, because my phone is so old. It's great, but I'd really love to be on GrapheneOS. I just can't afford to spend that much money on a Pixel that will be EOL so soon.
kelnos 5y ago
This sounds like another tired variation on the "open source is dead" article that popped up here a few weeks ago. People contribute to things for free for a variety of reasons. I've made only a couple contributions to OSM, but I'm happy to do so. The world needs freely available mapping data. Sure, the companies that benefit from it the most may not contribute financially or with manpower (just like with most open source), but that doesn't change the usefulness of OSM. I'd much rather we have something like OSM than have all this data locked up behind paywalls and contracts. Who does and doesn't support the work is irrelevant to me.
marcodiego 5y ago
Should you contribute to yourself for free?
fdr 5y ago
I recently picked up OSM mapping. The tools are way better than ten years ago when I had a look: I like both the web editor and the "Go Map!!" iOS application. My motivation is mostly so that I can have accurate results when visiting or re-visiting a place. In a few months (or weeks), the sheer number of OSM consumers allow you to receive the benefit of your own changes. Write once, read everywhere. I don't advance this is necessarily sufficient or OSM is getting a great deal for its value, but it's what got me involved after a long period watching from the sidelines: it was a wise suggestion from an AllTrails staff member on a support ticket.
mulmen 5y ago
The rare exception to Betteridge's law of headlines.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
I went on an OSM editing binge a few years ago to make Pokémon Go's in-game map better. Now that I've done that, I haven't had much reason to edit it more.
BoumTAC 5y ago
Does anyone know what happened to the Amazon team ? I was following their edits here: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=amap https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=amap They were one of the main contributors to OSM and now they nearly stop contributing to OSM (they are still contributing but maybe 10 times less than before)
jdavis703 5y ago
Stranger on the street asks for directions: I’m sorry, I can’t provide directions. I make $80/hour. Spending a minute giving you directions costs me more than $1 per minute, so please give me a $1.33 and then I’ll tell you where to go.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bluGill 5y ago
I contribute so that friends can find my house. I hope everyone reads OSM data and updates their maps. Too many people put my address in GPS and end up several miles away.
jessriedel 5y ago
Outsiders profit from a public commons project, so we shouldn't contribute to the commons? Am I misunderstanding the argument here? Wikipedia helps innumerable companies do basic research. Should I stop contributing to Wikipedia? When I clean trash from a local river, Sam's Row Boat rental benefits. Should I stop cleaning the river?
- CjMalone 5y ago
  > Outsiders profit from a public commons project, so we shouldn't contribute to the commons? That actually really resonates with me, thanks for writing it. It sounds like something I'd say in a conversation, flipping/re phrasing the argument to make someone see it differently. I often try to equate OSM to the commons (physical land, and digital software/media/culture). I'm glad I found OSM, it's the sweet spot for me, technical enough to interest me, but not to complicated that I can't contribute. I've tried (sometimes successfully) to contribute to Free Software, but unfortunately I'm not a developer. Obviously I can't add more physical common land to the world, but I do advocate for it, and our PRoW. Thank you. > When I clean trash from a local river, Sam's Row Boat Rental benefits. Should I stop cleaning the river? But should Sam's Row Boat Rental contribute to cleaning the river too? What about Sam's Fish and Chips, whos packaging is littering the river? Do they have a responsibility to clear the river post-littering? Do they have a responsibility to put bins around to stop the river being getting littered in? :P
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    I agree Sam and Chips should probably contribute (although it depends on details).
not2b 5y ago
I contribute fixes to hiking trails. That doesn't really help the big companies much, but does help my fellow hikers.
WalterBright 5y ago
I spent time writing careful reviews for Netflix. A couple years ago, they deleted them all. I spent time adding missing pictures for Amazon's book listings. A couple years ago, they deleted them all. Those books reverted to having no cover pictures. I don't bother contributing anymore. I didn't mind doing it for free, but if they don't care, I don't either.
dmckeon 5y ago
> Google says I’ve helped 90 000 people find the eye clinic in the last six months Presumably the clinic is not seeing 500 patients/customers per day, xor is a very large facility that thus should be findable.
- droidist2 5y ago
  They might have found it and then chosen somewhere else to go.

Google Maps is built on uncompensated user submissions, much of it involuntary (data from navigation, live and historical location, etc). We aren't their customers, we're the employees. That's why data ownership is such a verboten topic, it breaks their entire model.

zaik 5y ago

I contribute to OSM because I want to make alternatives to Google Maps like OsmAnd or Organicmaps more useful. That big players also use open data does not invalidate my reasons to contribute.

jefftk 5y ago
In fact, that big players also use it supports your reasons: everyone contributing back data helps make OSM more useful.

ydlr 5y ago

> They employ nobody in the OSM community. I imagine many of the employees that do the work mentioned in the article would consider themselves part of the OSM community.

petee 5y ago
I suspect they are suggesting a difference between working to contribute as part of the community, versus being solely to further their company's product.
notreallyserio 5y ago
I was hoping they'd include a comment describing what they mean when they talk about employing someone in the OSM community (and how they'd know).
burkaman 5y ago
Here's one example of a person employed by Apple to work on OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/andrewwiseman https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/andrewwiseman Facebook and Microsoft are also "Gold Corporate Members" of OSM which costs €10,000 / year, and they are "Corporate Partners" of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which does employ people to directly work on OSM: https://www.hotosm.org/ https://www.hotosm.org/. Also apparently "nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member" (https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/), and lots of people must be employed by corporations to make that happen, even if it's mostly automated edits.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Seems like circular reasoning: Being a part of the OSM community means they aren’t employed by OSM as employees. If they employ the person, they’re no longer a community member but an employee. I don’t actually see the issue.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > they aren’t employed by OSM Note that OSM does not employ anyone (Open Street Map Foundation has very limited employees and contractors, see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employees https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employee... )

phh 5y ago

At this point, I don't really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure. It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense economical value for the society. All alone, it's not really useful to end-users, but it can help a lot of businesses that couldn't exist before it. Maps are already considered infrastructure, since they are already made by governments! The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it.

Proven 5y ago
matkoniecz 5y ago
> The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it. The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets, and many such datasets are already in use and being used to improve OSM (and often problems are reported back, resulting in fixes in official datasets!). Government official editing directly would be in many cases more harmful than useful.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets Second best way to contribute is to force commercial corporations to share the datasets they have of what is essentially public data - what is in the physical world and where. Currently, I see a lot of this kind of data on Google Maps, but not on OSM (e.g. location of various cultural and commercial venues, public transportation lines and schedules etc.) And by "force" I mean something like legislation or regulation.
- phh 5y ago
  I understand why you say this (which sums up to "governments are bureaucrats, please get out of the way for us to do the actual job"), but the issue is that there are still people needed to go from government data to OSM. Ideally, governments would simply pay OSM people to do it on their own, but eh, we know this can never happen, and even if it did, greedy people might be tempted by that kind of money and would go into the OSM community just for that.

an_alien_heat 5y ago

No, because you shouldn't do work for giant tech companies for free.

throwaway984393 5y ago

If all open source software had new license terms tomorrow that said "no commercial use unless you pay me a license fee", they'd just stop using open source. Using it is a business calculation. If you don't get support and you have to pay for it, you might as well pay for proprietary software that you can get support from. And maybe that's fine! Maybe we shouldn't let companies use the software at all. But that would have ecosystem-shaking results as the costs are passed down to consumers and fewer engineers are employed. At this point, the whole world is dependent on OSS. Open Source does not exist for people to get paid. If it did, it'd be the worst software gig in the world, by pay anyway :) To ask for money just because somebody else is getting money and you're not is simply envy and greed. Either ask for the money up front before you release the thing, or don't worry about what other people are getting paid.

hirako2000 5y ago
The (strict) philosophy of open source isn't to take money from its adopters, or to prevent them to monetise, it is to spread the openness to serve humanity by having the intelligence reused and built upon rather than energy wasted on replicating and competing. Competition is a waste, contrary to the misinformation we have been subjected to, it only serves a minority at the expense of everyone else. Collaboration offers far greater efficiencies, the essence and success of open source lies in the openness and contagion of openness to share the yield of commutative expenses. I think the valid discontent you express is with regards to the open source flag being used to promote goodwill while in reality building a business model on it with closeness to protect monetisation. that I agree has been a plague and a very disingenuous approach to doing business, at the end hurting opensource, at least tarnishing the goodness reputation open source has built for decades.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > Competition is a waste I partially agree with this claim, but - FOSS software does not prevent competition, it just takes the intellectual property and copyrights aspect from it. You compete in conditions of access to your competitor's data as well as yours. And there is intense competition in FOSS! It doesn't devolve into everybody working on the same thing. But the point is it is always possible to derive from one of the "branches" of competition and do your own thing. (Case in point: Desktop environments which based themselves on GNOME 2 because they didn't like where GNOME 3 was headed design-wise.)

mwattsun 5y ago

I've enjoyed Google Maps for many years and never paid for it. Apple MapKit appears to be free. I improve the experience for others when I help improve the maps and in turn my experience is improved by the contributions of others. It's costs Google and Apple money to provide the infrastructure for this, which they obtain in various ways such as advertising. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to advertise their store on a map I helped create. In fact, even that improves the amount of information I have about a place. My answer to the title question is a strong "yes" in this case and I consider it akin to a grocery store putting up signs saying "Please help us keep costs down and pass the savings along to you by returning your cart to the cart stand." Giant mega corp Walmart does this if memory serves. I like that humanity has built such an amazing thing as maps and like it when people return their shopping carts.

TheJoeMan 5y ago
Question: if I contribute a fix to Google Maps or Apple Maps, does that fix back-propogate to OSM? My home address needs to be slightly shifted and wondering for best practice.
- thepete2 5y ago
  No and that is IMO the point of using OSM in the first place. The data is public and free for everyone and if you contribute there's the possibility of other services adopting your change. I know that mapbox integrates osm data, Google and Apple might too.
- windthrown 5y ago
  No, in fact copying from Google Maps is a violation of their terms of service: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_don.27t_you_just_use_Google_Maps.2Fwhoever_for_your_data.3F https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_don.27t_you_just...
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  If you contribute to Google Maps then you fix private Google database.

cheeaun 5y ago

I’m curious to know if the companies that use OSM actually contribute back? Like fixing all the wrong/malicious data.

burkaman 5y ago
Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ > nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member.
- tapiok 5y ago
  ...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.
  - burkaman 5y ago
    Can you expand on how contributions suck economic value from the community? What community, and what value is being lost?
    - tapiok 5y ago
      The economic value left on the table by volunteers is consumed not by the ones who need it most, but by people who need it the least. This breaks the 2nd principle of justice as formulated by Rawls. Shall I say more...
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    As a user of OSM (and having contributed in the past but that's not relevant to my point) it looks like, to me, that if their share of edits is growing that they are providing free labor to me and people like me, no?
  - ciphol 5y ago
    Corporations, whether giant or not, create products which people chose to purchase because they are useful. That's creating value, not sucking value. Sometimes a corporation can "suck value" by using anticompetitive behavior to prevent competitors from offering better/cheaper products to consumers. But in this case, Google is the big corporation, and contributions to OSM benefit smaller competitors at the expense of Google, creating more options and more value for consumers overall.

Rygian 5y ago

The main difference is that, with OSM, a third party can make direct commercial profit from my edits, but so can anyone else including me.

thepete2 5y ago
Your edit to google maps is a competitive advantage. Your edit to OSM is a public utility.
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  Google's competitive advantage?
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    Yes, exactly. If someone improves Google Maps then such contribution is under control and owned by Google. If someone improves OSM then such contribution can be used by anyone - from hobby map maker, through artists, maker of open source navigation to evil corporations.

hirako2000 5y ago

no. I wish osm would adjust their licensing to prevent reuse of contributions to build non free (as in open) servicing.

simonh 5y ago
Since companies including Apple and Microsoft contribute a lot of data and funding to OSM, what benefits do you imagine would result from preventing them using it?
pcthrowaway 5y ago
It's the permissive vs. free software license debate. In practice there are people who won't be able to use the data for their use case if a non-permissive license is applied.
- nightpool 5y ago
  > In practice there are people who won't be able to use the data for their use case if a non-permissive license is applied Well, of course. The whole point of a non-permissive license is to.... not permit things. It's frustrating to see people bring this out like some sort of gotcha. I use the AGPL because I think it's important that users have access to the source code the applications they interact with operate on. If people aren't okay with that, then they're completely welcome to not use my code. (I am somewhat sympathetic to people who think that the GPL's definition of "Combined Work" is too broad—I've personally never viewed the inclusion of dependencies in a dynamic programming language with strong module boundaries like Node, Ruby or Python as creating a "Combined Work"—and I'd happily license my works with a theoretical LAGPL or an Affero-like Mozilla Public License if either of those were available. Unfortunately, the AGPL remains the only game in town for networked software.)
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    I'm not sure if you're aware, but the data on OSM is covered by their ODbL which is a "share-alike" license. From their FAQ[1]: What do you mean by Share-Alike? If you publicly use any adapted version of our database, or a partial extraction from it, or works (such as maps) produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL. In other words, if you improve our data and then distribute it, you need to share your improvements with the general public at no charge. A painless way to do that is to contribute your improvements directly back to OpenStreetMap. Share-Alike only applies if you distribute what you have done to outside people or organisations. You can do what you like at home, or in your school, organisation or company ... the following section does not apply to you. It's true that people can use their software and data for non-free services built on non-FOSS code, but people using the data publicly do have to distribute modifications to the data-set under the same license [1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License

yosito 5y ago

This article is a bit scattered. But it makes one good point: Big Tech companies are profiting off of the OSM data set, while employing no one working on OSM. How do we change that?

simonh 5y ago
Apple and Microsoft do contribute a lot of data back to OSM though, as pointed out in the article, and they help fund it. OSM doesn’t employ anyone full time, but there are Apple and MS employees that contribute to OSM near or actually full time. So what exactly is it you think needs changing?
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Strictly speaking OSM does not employ anyone partly because it is not some legal entity. (Open Street Map Foundation has very limited employees and contractors, see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employees https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employee... )
burkaman 5y ago
We don't need to change that because it isn't true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714360 The author is using very specific phrasing ("in the OSM community") that apparently excludes corporate employees that contribute to OSM.
- tapiok 5y ago
  of course it is true OSM mappers provide free labor (also) to corporate giants. They have vested (economic) interest to not fork the OSM project exactly for this reason. Maybe they will do it one day though.
betwixthewires 5y ago
These companies contribute ~17% of worldwide road change updates, if that's not employing anyone to work on OSM then what exactly do you mean by "work on OSM?"

IgorPartola 5y ago

About 10 years ago I helped build a piece of software that would use OSM data and that data needed to be precise. Turned out that a lot of the Tiger Maps scans were not super accurate so I urged our company to hire a data entry team to clean up a bunch of it. We had I think 5 or 6 people whose job it was to precisely clean up OSM data based on satellite imagery in a bunch of small-medium cities as well as Chicago. Everyone benefitted from this which was awesome.

tomrod 5y ago
In today's AI/ML saturated landscape, your approach to data labeling to augment applications is much needed. Awesome to hear it went well!
tverbeure 5y ago
The TIGER data was (is?) terrible in terms of exact coordinates, but the graph of the streets is usually accurate. Back in 2007 or so, I spent hundreds of hours aligning TIGER data to the satellite imagery in OSM, usually in cities I never had been before. If I remember correctly, I did most of Fresno. :-) I’m totally fine with my edits being used commercially too.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The status of the initial Tiger data varies by county. Many counties were poorly aligned, but many counties were also pretty good, depending on whether the county had been updated in a quality improvement project that Census was doing when the OSM import happened.

matkoniecz 5y ago

> Microsoft Bing uses OSM in several regions, and is slowly moving from it’s traditional providers to OSM globally. They provide machine-learning (ML) datasets that they have computed from areal imagery. They employ nobody in the OSM community. Microsoft Bing made its aerial imagery available for OSM editing, this is often very very very useful for mapping (speaking from own experience as an OSM mapper). See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/product/imagery-service-editor-app-apis-terms https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/product/imagery-service... > The rights that you have under this agreement are limited solely to aerial imagery use in a non-commercial online editor application of OpenStreetMap maps (an "Application") see also extra info in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clarifications https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clari... It is an interesting case as cost of that is basically nothing to Microsoft, this action has a very clear benefits to them, has negative influence on their competition like Google, has basically no negative side effects to OSM community (unlike company hiring people) and provides service that would cost OSM community ridiculous amounts of money if we would need to buy it (it would be impossible for us to buy worldwide aerial imagery of such quality). It is weird to not mention it in that article.

londons_explore 5y ago
> costs basically nothing to Microsoft I wouldn't be surprised if this agreement was a big headache when Microsoft is licensing imagery from various satellite imagery providers.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  Well we have SpaceX now... and Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. Launch some satellites.
  - delusional 5y ago
    The highest quality aerial photography of my country (Denmark) is taken from planes, not satellites.

123pie123 5y ago

I wish Ordnance Survey in the UK would help out a little with the UK dataset - even with just say the buildings

g_p 5y ago
OS is increasingly making available data under public open licences. I believe data under open government licence should be compatible with OSM, as it's pretty permissive. If you combine a few different datasets you can build a pretty good picture https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products?Product%20type=0/154/173/175 https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/product... The UPRN dataset gives you a point coordinate for each property. The Zoomstack map gives building level vectors, I believe (if it isn't Zoomstack, it's one of the other free and open ones), and is pretty usable in qgis and other tools.
- 123pie123 5y ago
  thanks, would that make it ok for someone to import the information from OS to OSM? edit: found the answer (abeit an old thread) https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=66173 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=66173

matkoniecz 5y ago

> The only one I can recommend as being easy to use is StreetComplete for Android This is nice to hear as major contributor to that software (if you use that app and something is unclear then it is likely a bug that should be reported to https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues )

VictorPath 5y ago

OpenStreetMap has an "on the ground rule" where a street, a street name, a city, a city name etc. are determined by who currently has control on the ground. So the Malvinas are the Falkland Islands, Derry is Londonderry etc. The sole exception to this is the Crimea, which the OSM board ruled is exempt from this rule, as they favor the Ukrainian government over the Russian government.

Symbiote 5y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, looking at your comment history: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
avar 5y ago
Your summary seems inaccurate per https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DWG_2014-06-05_Special_Crimea https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DW... I.e. they ruled that any mass changes based on administrative declarations weren't OK, but changing street names was fine if the on the ground signage had been changed.
- VictorPath 5y ago
  Well, the secretary of the OpenStreetMap foundation also said they are making an exemption to their rules in the case of Crimea ( https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-February/005972.html https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-Feb... ). So either what I and the person in charge of it are saying is inaccurate, or what you are saying is inaccurate.
  - avar 5y ago
    You started that they were making an exception to "[on the ground rules] where a street, a street name, a city, a city name etc. are determined by who currently has control on the ground". This falls under criteria #3 on the linked page[1] and as far as I can tell is being done with the same "on the ground" rule that OSM has always used. The exception you're linking to is relevant to what country relation and similar data structures Crimea is in. The usual application of the rule would be to have it Russia only, but it's in both Russia and Ukraine. Almost nobody who uses OSM ever has to deal with country relations, so implying that this is some major policy change is blowing things out of proportion. It also seems like the least bad way to mark up the data to me. To the extent that geopolitical borders mean anything it's in fact the case that Crimea is still to some extent Ukranian, even though Russia has "on the ground" control. I.e. various other countries have sanctions etc. in place that recognize that that's the case, as opposed to the rest of Russia. If WWII happened today wouldn't the most useful thing for OSM to do to still have say the Channel islands in the UK to some extent in 1943, and under Axis control? I.e. to have overlapping claims of sovereignty, and simply add disputed/occupied relations on top of those? 1. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DWG_2014-06-05_Special_Crimea https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DW...

efsavage 5y ago

> They employ nobody in the OSM community. If they are contributing data, they are part of the OSM community.

nurgasemetey 5y ago

While working with municipalities, they provided us with shapefile of bicycle routes and add to our systems. It would have been better if they just added bicycle routes to OSM but I think they don't want to take responsibility of maintaining it.

sovietmudkipz 5y ago

I struggle with contributing to open source but in a different context. In my opinion, the video games industry is information sparse on high quality software engineering practices, for whatever reason (NDAs, language/culture, etc). I am already authoring content that basically imports DevOps practices and experiences I have from my day job into a video games context. I believe practitioners have an edge over non-practitioners. Yet I hesitate to release it. I hesitate because ultimately I cannot fully silence my ego. I want to release my content and have a positive impact on game creators. I know my ideas and hard work will be taken and rebroadcast by other teacher content creators without credit. In abstract that my ideas will spread to a wider audience will maximize its impact. ...But I want my hard work to be recognized and credited which is hamstringing my willingness to release. My ego wants me to keep this information private and work in a closed source way. "Ha, I am so smart that I grok this stuff and can apply it," I imagine my mindset saying. "Look at how these fools struggle, ignorant of a better way." However; I have benefited from others making the brave choice to work in an open source way. How do people who give away their work (MIT or CC license) think about it? I feel like a jerk for benefiting from a culture of open source and yet I have this inner conflict?

davidjytang 5y ago
I'm not a open source contributor in a major way. Just wanted to chime in. No doubt at least part of your know-how, however small, was built upon others' experiences (also hard to give credit for everything). If you do release your content, this is just giving back to the community. Also to play with your ego side, let's say some other person beats you to releasing the content that you wanted to release. And that person markets well and takes a lot of credit that you wanted. Would your ego push you to publish sooner?
- sovietmudkipz 5y ago
  Haha, I love the concept of leaning into my ego to try to bring out the same desired outcome. It reminds me how RadioLab did a podcast on the idea of altruism as a selfish trait. I think in a way we are all pilots of this big elephant like meat machine. It has its wants, it has its needs, and as pilots we are trying to steer ourselves with the understanding that the elephant is ultimately doing what it wants. I suppose the trick is to understand the elephant (ourselves) to know how to steer into the direction we want.

juliansimioni 5y ago

Here is why you should contribute to OSM even though there are major players profiting from it: OSM is big enough and good enough that all the tech giants (except Google) would do better to start with OSM and improve it to meet their needs than to start a new, completely proprietary map from scratch. That means that we are in an amazing place where in addition to the substantial volunteer OSM community, there are contributions from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and hundreds or thousands of smaller companies all coming back in to a single global map that everyone can use. It's very worth it to do work that strengthens OSM, as it increases the number of companies that will use it, and possibly contribute back, rather than doing work the world at large won't benefit from. P.S. As a disclaimer, I am co-founder of Geocode Earth (https://geocode.earth https://geocode.earth) a small business that does indeed profit from OSM (and other open) data. We also contribute back both through OSM contributions and by releasing our core software as the Pelias geocoder (https://pelias.io https://pelias.io)

humanistbot 5y ago
Right! Remember when Google made their Maps API far more restrictive and it broke a whole bunch of cool applications that were built on top of it? That can't happen with OSM.
matkoniecz 5y ago
Yes, would it be really better to be in situation where standard dataset is proprietary and controlled by Google?
lukeqsee 5y ago
I second Julian here, as the founder of another company (in profile) that profits heavily from OSM's data set. It's amazing how good OSM is today, and the rate at which it's expanding and improving means it will only get much better over time.
- durkie 5y ago
  Thanks for Stadia maps! Happy paying customer here and it substantially lowered my map hosting bill compared to mapbox.

EGreg 5y ago

Could this be a good use case for cryptocurrency?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
matkoniecz 5y ago
For which part? Main complaint in article is that major companies should employ people from OSM community. But inability to transfer money is not something blocking Microsoft or FB here.
- EGreg 5y ago
  The part where people contribute anonymously and receive compensation
lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
No.
- EGreg 5y ago
  How are you so sure? Please elaborate
  - lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
    OSM is making a volunteer-run open source GIS dataset, not an unregulated speculative securities offering.
    - EGreg 5y ago
      who is talking about securities? I'm talking about micropayments
justapassenger 5y ago
Solution still looking for problems to solve?

cletus 5y ago

It's a good question to ask. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember the cautionary tale of CDDB/Gracenote [1]. Back when Compact Discs were still a thing. on Winamp, WMP, etc you wanted to display a list of tracks, covert art, the artist, etc. Volunteers contributed this data from their own discs (that could be identified). This was before MP3s and ID3 tagging. So volunteers built the CDDB with this data. The entity that "owned" it silently put in a copyright assignment with any submissions and ultimately became a company called Gracenote, which still exists today. They also removed the free access to CDDB. None of this matters today but at the time it was a huge loss and a betrayal. So I personally think it's completely fine to contribute to something like OSM as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access to that data can't be lost. It doesn't bother me if the likes of Apple and Microsoft use that for commercial uses, particularly if in doing so they contribute data back to the project. This is why Stackoverflow dumps [2] were done in the first place and why they're so important: as a guarantee against that data being taken away or put behind a paywall. Beware the CDDBs of the world however. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB [2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-exchange-data-dumps/224922#224922 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-ex...

matkoniecz 5y ago
> as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access to that data can't be lost. 1) current dataset can be fully downloaded and is available under a copyleft license https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm 2) it would be relatively hard to hijack project https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Terms https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Term... OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL 1.0 for the database and DbCL 1.0 for the individual contents of the database; CC-BY-SA 2.0; or such other free and open licence (for example, http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/ http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/) as may from time to time be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors.
danShumway 5y ago

gumby 5y ago

> They employ nobody in the OSM community. Malone keeps saying this but I don’t think it means what he says it is. Those large entities employ lots of people who add to OSM. Not only do they add content but by his own description they do QC and add other new features and support. Their contributions are no different (except in magnitude) than a single, tiny contribution I might make, yet presumably that would make me “part of the community” but not them?

gnufx 5y ago
Actually, one difference is that contributions by, for instance Amazon in my experience, have been lower-quality than the typical amateur on-the-ground mapping. However, their contributors have been gracious and apparently willing to learn when you point out you've surveyed the area and they've put a service road -- it's usually service roads! -- through a wall next to the house numbers you added, for example. But, yes, it seems rather like saying that Intel or IBM contributors aren't in the GNU community, and that would have been absurd to argue about Cygnus. The worry might be organizational take-over by commercial interests (Linux Foundation?), but that's different.

nraynaud 5y ago

I have tried providing a correction to OSM, they never got moderated or integrated. But there is a local club because they used the email address I provided to invite me. I don’t think I want to spend time doing it again.

purple_turtle 5y ago
Edits on OpenStreetMap are not moderated, any edit goes live immediately. Do you remember your account name?

heikkilevanto 5y ago

I have contributed a few details to OSM, as well as to Google Maps. Not for any high-flying moral reasons, but because I use them and found the small errors irritating.

CodeWriter23 5y ago

Yes we should definitely kill off the only mapping solution accessible to bootstrapping startups because big players are semi-freeloading.

tapiok 5y ago
there are other options. For example https://n8n.io/blog/fair-code-for-sustainable-open-source-alternatives/ https://n8n.io/blog/fair-code-for-sustainable-open-source-al...

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

I use OSM data for free too, and don't employ anyone from OSM. Why wouldn't I fix the data around where I live, if I can, and if it helps me, and everyone else trying to navigate here? I fix stuff here, someone else fixes stuff somewhere else, there are also gamified apps (atleast one), where you can get "badges" to input basic data to OSM, and everyone profits.

maceurt 5y ago

I am against any large scale collection of data that can be used to take away an individual's privacy or to assist a government/business/person's ability to track someone's location or residence. Its one thing to not be able to do anything about a private business collecting this information on their own volition, but its another to actually aid in its collection yourself. The more you accept and buy into this reality the faster it will accelerate out of control with opposition being not just those who stand to gain from its existence, but from useful idiots who don't understand sunk cost fallacy. The biggest hindrance in the long term happiness of the human species is the inability to reverse change. Even while we can admit a certain change is bad, we can never mitigate further change let alone put the cat back in the bag.

throw8932894 5y ago
Privacy ship has sailed long time ago. Try to remove license plates from your car. Or refuse to share information about your health! Now it is about gate keeping. Young people and startups, need the same ability as govs and established players. Until recently you could not even embed maps on your website (too expensive). Free data are levelling the playing field. And if anything OpenStreetMap helps me not to share my location. I can store map of entire continent offline on my phone, and do not have to ask remote servers for navigation!
- maceurt 5y ago
  If we created a change we can un-create it. People who just accept that we are powerless to our past are the architects of our future hell. > I can store map of entire continent offline on my phone, and do not have to ask remote servers for navigation! The fact that you think anybody would need to have that is ridiculous. And also I can store an entire map of pretty much any place I need to go to and it doesn't require a phone.... Furthermore, maps are only necessary in over bloated cities not designed with facilitating humans as the main objective. Just because that is where most people live nonetheless does not make it any more right.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago

This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for election to the OSM Foundation board this month.) But, as others have pointed out, I’d hope we’re more welcoming than that. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re editing OSM you’re part of the community.

kevinventullo 5y ago
My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a member of the community. More generally, there is nothing the big companies could do to make them happy, short of divesting completely from OSM so that they can get their hobby project from 2008 back.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  I’m sure you can find any given opinion in a community of 2m registered users with a public mailing list, especially any community which includes a bunch of 17-year old Linux enthusiasts, but it’s not remotely representative of the OSM community nor a particularly useful subset to identify.
  - kevinventullo 5y ago
    I agree they are not representative of the community, but they are a quite vocal minority, to whom anyone working on OSM in a corporate context is well-acquainted. I offer my observations as a warning to take any anti-corporate sentiment from self-proclaimed OSM community representatives with a grain of salt.
    - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
      I’d fully agree with the latter. Sometimes (often) a gobshite on a mailing list is just a gobshite on a mailing list. (He says, looking anxiously at his own 2000 list postings over 17 years.) The lists are sometimes attributed a significance they don’t really have any more - they have a few hundred subscribers max in a massive project. Most of the OSM US community discussion happens on Slack, in Germany it’s a webforum, some countries use Telegram and so on.

warkdarrior 5y ago

The post claims both that some companies contribute to OSM and that they do not employ anyone from the OSM community. There is some level of gatekeeping here, as the blog implies is that that employees at those companies are not part of the OSM community although they contribute to OSM. With this attitude ("no true OSM contributor unless I approve of"), it is hard to grow the community by welcoming new people.

up6w6 5y ago

Can someone give details about what is the best way to contribute? Is there some easy way like just installing an app in my phone and receive popup notifications to answer some quick questions when I'm in a queue of a random local shop?

Rygian 5y ago
Yup, you can install Streetcomplete which does exactly that.
cowsandmilk 5y ago
If you’re on Android: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete
mngnt 5y ago
Check out StreetComplete. It's basically a map with question icons that help improve osm. It's even a bit gamified, you get achievements for a volume of replies :) Importantly, you can configure which types of question do you get, so you won't get bored by replying the same stuff again. More specialized, but perhaps more important for certain people is wheelmap.org. It catalogues amenities and their wheelchair accessibility. It has similar model for contribution as StreetComplete, you answer question about stairs, door widths and toilet accessibility. Have fun mapping :) Edit: corrected autocorrect.
matkoniecz 5y ago
If you have iPhone then GoMap!! is a really good editor. On computer you can also open https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/ and navigate to are you know well and press edit (tutorial should appear). There is also Vespucci on Android and JOSM for PC for more powerful and more complicated editing. All editing requires registration for user account. Feel free to use one of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels if you want help from a community (and "I am confused newbie" is a good reason to ask).

epaulson 5y ago

I've always thought OSM's data license should be more BSD-ish than the current LGPLish license. If you were trying to privately build and edit data from OSM, there'd be a pretty strong incentive to get most of your updates and corrections upstreamed back into OSM, (especially for things that are broadly of interest to the rest of the community) because eventually someone will also create those updates in the upstream OSM, and then you'll have to deal with how to merge your changes with the OSM changes. I think OSM would benefit more with more people building on the dataset, because even if a smaller percentage actually contributed back, they'd make up for it with a larger overall set of people building on the dataset. And I think they'd get a larger set of people building on the dataset with a more permissive license. (The obvious counterpoint is OSM is doing just fine with its current license)

tomarr 5y ago
I don't think that's obvious, e.g. an Apple or Facebook could take OSM and fork it privately and invest all their efforts into that, without releasing upstream for competitive advantage.
purple_turtle 5y ago
Given how BSD was used to create proprietary MacOS and PlayStation operating systems with basically nothing contributed back - I am not convinced.

chaz6 5y ago

I am happy to contribute for free, but after what happened with Mapillary, I would like a clause that states that should OSM be sold, I would be entitled to a portion of the sale amount commensurate with my contributions, or the option to withhold my contributions from the sale.

commoner 5y ago
The difference between Mapillary and OSM is that Mapillary is a for-profit company, while OSM is an open dataset managed by a non-profit organization. The OSM Foundation can't sell its intellectual property rights to a for-profit company like Facebook without violating its mission statement:[1] > The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international, not-for-profit, democratic organisation with the tasks of supporting the OSM project, running and protecting the OSM database, and making it available to all. The OSMF membership is open to all who want to support the project and participate in the OSMF’s democratic process. > The OpenStreetMap Foundation is there to protect the OSM data to keep it Free and Open. Mapillary had always stated in their terms that any street imagery contributed to them belong to them. They then relicensed the imagery to be used for OSM contributions and other non-commercial purposes free of charge, but charged for commercial use. When Facebook acquired Mapillary, they obtained ownership of all of the contributions for their own use, but also relicensed them to be available free of charge for both commercial and non-commercial use.[2] Many Mapillary contributors like you did not want Facebook to obtain the data. Since the OSM Foundation is non-profit, a similar situation would not happen to OSM as long as the OSM Foundation continues to be governed by people who have the best interests of the project and the community at heart. [1] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement [2] https://joemorrison.medium.com/why-on-earth-did-facebook-just-acquire-mapillary-9838405272f8 https://joemorrison.medium.com/why-on-earth-did-facebook-jus...
matkoniecz 5y ago
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Terms https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Term... > OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL 1.0 for the database and DbCL 1.0 for the individual contents of the database; CC-BY-SA 2.0; or such other free and open licence (for example, http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/ http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/) as may from time to time be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors. So it would be necessary to hijack Open Street Map Foundation, though it is still possibility. Note that Mapillary from start was for-profit company with contributors giving full right to their photos.

globular-toast 5y ago

> I’m not gonna lie, I kind of like that idea. In the OSM world you just have to have faith that your edits are helping people. There is basically no feedback loop. Do people really need this? I use OSM whenever I go on a walk anywhere in the world and I often think about the local mappers who maintain the data. I can say with almost complete certainty that someone, somewhere has appreciated my own OSM contributions at some point. That's enough for me.

kranke155 5y ago

Seems like a great use case for web3 and DAOs later on when they become a bit less anarchic. You could tokenise contributions to OpenStreetMap.

timeon 5y ago
If someone does not want to contribute for free it is his decision. But many people like volunteering. OSM has already massive contribution from hobby users (and from corporations as well). What will "web3" solve here? Not everything needs to be monetized.

npteljes 5y ago

Yes you absolutely should. But, should you expect to make a living out of it? No.

nradov 5y ago

My friends and I use a lot of Garmin fitness trackers and bike computers for endurance sports training. Those devices use maps derived from OSM. So when I contribute data to OSM for free I (eventually) see a direct benefit with better navigation on my devices.

delusional 5y ago

Corollary: Why are contributions to OpenStreetMap systematically undervalued? I think it's a much more interesting question WHY we are being asked to contribute to OSM for free. Why isn't it possible/feasible to gain compensation relative to the amount of value contributed? And what does that mean for our "free market" in general. If you can't compensate this kind of project, are they being repressed by the inherent incentive structures? I don't think that's a failure of the OSM project, but rather a failure of our economic system.

rStar 5y ago

betwixthewires 5y ago

> It may be mainly made by individuals in there spare time, but the big tech companies are making millions of it. Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing credibility. > They are reasonably good at fixing and contributing data to OSM in those regions. They employ nobody in the OSM community. Except whoever contributes data to OSM in those regions? The same for every example in the list. Amazon is literally mapping towns for all of us and giving it away for free. What's the criteria for "in the OSM community" if not "contributes to OSM"? What's the point of FOSS if not this?

KennyBlanken 5y ago
> Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing credibility. Your first sentence has punctuation errors, and your second sentence it littered with grammatical errors...
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Deliberate, nuance. To get my point across articulated with my sentiment and attitude about what I'm saying. A similar approach to the cultural context included in colloquial dialects. A far cry away from "there" instead of "their" and "of" instead of "off."

jmnicolas 5y ago

To me this article reads like "I want to get a job paid by the big players". The fact is, it's not a one way street, they're contributing back with data. We all benefit from this. While I dislike what these companies stand for (I use a Linux desktop and a degoogled phone) in this case I don't think they're in the wrong.

cjmalone 5y ago
> To me this article reads like "I want to get a job paid by the big players". You're not wrong. This is an interesting time in my life. I have next to no formal education and and no work experience worth documenting. In order to pay rent, I've been working retail, through a pandemic, and just before Christmas I finally got Covid. I say "finally" because we all knew it was going to happen. It was never "if", but "when". I'm questioning the amount of value I put into our world, and the amount I get out. Some would argue the amount of value I add to the supermarket is almost nothing, and so I deserve to be paid almost nothing. I'm not going to argue against this, but the supermarket is making record profits and clearly generating lots of "value" for the owners, all while I get a real terms wage cut due to inflation. OSM is the interesting part. I clearly add value to OSM, and in turn everyone who uses it. And it's something I enjoy, and am good at. I would like to be compensated in some way for that. I would love to never have to play Russian Roulette again, simply by being a wage slave in a supermarket in a pandemic. Ironically one of the quantifiable ways I add value to the OSM consumers is by adding address data that gets used by delivery companies. This improves there turn around time for each delivery point, but ultimately leads to a harsher targets for the employees. (Please everyone, watch "Sorry We Missed You"!). > The fact is, it's not a one way street, they're contributing back with data. We all benefit from this. They absolutely do, and I'm grateful for it, but I'm also selfish and want to be compensated. > While I dislike what these companies stand for (I use a Linux desktop and a degoogled phone) in this case I don't think they're in the wrong. They aren't wrong, in terms of the licence. (They are wrong in terms of what they stand for) :P I'm on LineageOS at the moment, because my phone is so old. It's great, but I'd really love to be on GrapheneOS. I just can't afford to spend that much money on a Pixel that will be EOL so soon.

kelnos 5y ago

This sounds like another tired variation on the "open source is dead" article that popped up here a few weeks ago. People contribute to things for free for a variety of reasons. I've made only a couple contributions to OSM, but I'm happy to do so. The world needs freely available mapping data. Sure, the companies that benefit from it the most may not contribute financially or with manpower (just like with most open source), but that doesn't change the usefulness of OSM. I'd much rather we have something like OSM than have all this data locked up behind paywalls and contracts. Who does and doesn't support the work is irrelevant to me.

marcodiego 5y ago

Should you contribute to yourself for free?

fdr 5y ago

I recently picked up OSM mapping. The tools are way better than ten years ago when I had a look: I like both the web editor and the "Go Map!!" iOS application. My motivation is mostly so that I can have accurate results when visiting or re-visiting a place. In a few months (or weeks), the sheer number of OSM consumers allow you to receive the benefit of your own changes. Write once, read everywhere. I don't advance this is necessarily sufficient or OSM is getting a great deal for its value, but it's what got me involved after a long period watching from the sidelines: it was a wise suggestion from an AllTrails staff member on a support ticket.

mulmen 5y ago

The rare exception to Betteridge's law of headlines.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

I went on an OSM editing binge a few years ago to make Pokémon Go's in-game map better. Now that I've done that, I haven't had much reason to edit it more.

BoumTAC 5y ago

Does anyone know what happened to the Amazon team ? I was following their edits here: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=amap https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=amap They were one of the main contributors to OSM and now they nearly stop contributing to OSM (they are still contributing but maybe 10 times less than before)

jdavis703 5y ago

Stranger on the street asks for directions: I’m sorry, I can’t provide directions. I make $80/hour. Spending a minute giving you directions costs me more than $1 per minute, so please give me a $1.33 and then I’ll tell you where to go.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bluGill 5y ago

I contribute so that friends can find my house. I hope everyone reads OSM data and updates their maps. Too many people put my address in GPS and end up several miles away.

jessriedel 5y ago

Outsiders profit from a public commons project, so we shouldn't contribute to the commons? Am I misunderstanding the argument here? Wikipedia helps innumerable companies do basic research. Should I stop contributing to Wikipedia? When I clean trash from a local river, Sam's Row Boat rental benefits. Should I stop cleaning the river?

CjMalone 5y ago
> Outsiders profit from a public commons project, so we shouldn't contribute to the commons? That actually really resonates with me, thanks for writing it. It sounds like something I'd say in a conversation, flipping/re phrasing the argument to make someone see it differently. I often try to equate OSM to the commons (physical land, and digital software/media/culture). I'm glad I found OSM, it's the sweet spot for me, technical enough to interest me, but not to complicated that I can't contribute. I've tried (sometimes successfully) to contribute to Free Software, but unfortunately I'm not a developer. Obviously I can't add more physical common land to the world, but I do advocate for it, and our PRoW. Thank you. > When I clean trash from a local river, Sam's Row Boat Rental benefits. Should I stop cleaning the river? But should Sam's Row Boat Rental contribute to cleaning the river too? What about Sam's Fish and Chips, whos packaging is littering the river? Do they have a responsibility to clear the river post-littering? Do they have a responsibility to put bins around to stop the river being getting littered in? :P
- jessriedel 5y ago
  I agree Sam and Chips should probably contribute (although it depends on details).

not2b 5y ago

I contribute fixes to hiking trails. That doesn't really help the big companies much, but does help my fellow hikers.

WalterBright 5y ago

I spent time writing careful reviews for Netflix. A couple years ago, they deleted them all. I spent time adding missing pictures for Amazon's book listings. A couple years ago, they deleted them all. Those books reverted to having no cover pictures. I don't bother contributing anymore. I didn't mind doing it for free, but if they don't care, I don't either.

dmckeon 5y ago

> Google says I’ve helped 90 000 people find the eye clinic in the last six months Presumably the clinic is not seeing 500 patients/customers per day, xor is a very large facility that thus should be findable.

droidist2 5y ago
They might have found it and then chosen somewhere else to go.